This week we heard from a mom, who along with her husband, is adopting a child who lived with us in foster care for one year. For confidentiality purposes, we'll call him Billy. His new mom sent us pictures, and told us that the adoption process is close to being concluded. This is wonderful news. His new parents are wonderful. The dad is a military recruiter and chef. The mom is a computer whiz, who stays at home with Billy during the day. They are mature adults with conservative beliefs and values. They are just exactly what Billy needs.
Billy is a charming, good-looking three-and-one-half-year-old. He was eighteen months old when he came to live with us. He had been raising himself. His mother was a teenager who worked at a fast food restaurant. The police found him hanging out at a convenience store with his brother, who was two years older than Billy. Billy knew a lot about violence. When he got in a fight, he fought to kill, and used whatever weapon he could. His favorite weapon was his teeth.
Billy misinterpreted kindness as weakness. Billy received the most kindness from my wife Colleen and my son Jon, who was then four-years-old. Yet, Jon was most often the target of Billy's biting, and Colleen was the target of Billy's sand-in-the-face throws and most vociferous temper tantrums. Once a neglected child gets a whiff of what it is like to be nurtured, he may want that nurturing non-stop. The foster parent must then teach the child that in the real world people over the age of eighteen months do not get nurtured non-stop! The fact that he did not get that nurturing as an infant does not change that reality.
The children foster parents take into their homes are in many ways similar to the foster parents own children. Some are physically very attractive, as is Billy, and to the untrained eye may seem to be "adorable." But, because of their unique experiences being neglected and/or abused, they will bring with them some behaviors that the foster parents never saw in their own children. Add that to the fact that the bond is not the same as the bond they have with their own biological children, and you may have a situation that can test the patience of the best foster parents.
ABANDONMENT
Foster parents may get to reap what is sown by birthparents: the child's deep-seated anger and resentment that his needs were not taken care of in those crucial first eighteen months. As frightening as it is to see the depth of rage the child may exhibit, it is equally heartbreaking and sad. After missing five straight weeks of scheduled visits with Billy, his biological mother finally showed up for a visit with Billy and his older brother, whom we shall call Jed. Jed had always rejected Billy. They were placed in two different foster homes because of their extreme history of violence with each other.
Jed's foster mother, a single woman aged 63, was a former civil rights attorney, and tough as nails. She was terrific at the core job of a foster parent who has a child like Jed: civilizing him! She made him give Billy a kiss, while we all waited in the waiting room for the biological mom, who was late. When the mom comes into the visiting room waiting area, Jed's foster mom encouraged him to go give his mom a hug.
After the visit I encouraged Billy to give his mom one more hug, which he did, but then showed no sorrow at leaving her, because he now had parents who were there for him every hour of every day. When we arrived home after the visit, he saw our truck and got excited, because Colleen is usually driving it, and that meant that she was probably home. He runs to her and holds out his arms for her to pick him up. He exclaims, "Mama!" Colleen has successfully created a bond, not to mention the fact that this child who came to us speaking no words is now speaking words with a flourish.
When Billy first came to us, he would go to anyone, from teen girls to adult women, but was always very frightened of men. The man with whom his biologiccal mother was living had a record for violent crimes, and we can only guess what kinds of violence Billy was exposed to when he lived with his mom. He bonded much more rapidly with Colleen than he did with me. When he first came to us I had to be very protective of my own children, whom Billy was biting several times a day. Colleen was often working outside the home. I had many stern face-to-face talks with Billy about "NO BITING!" He kept his distance from me the first few weeks. Soon, though, he learned that he could get his nurturing from us, and he no longer looked for it from strangers.
Nevertheless, the next week after the visit revealed the depth of Billy's anger. He kicked and bit other children, and spit at Colleen (transferring the anger he felt toward his own mom). He picked up objects and hit other objects as hard as he could. He headed toward other people with the weapons in his hands. No doubt about it: if he had the right weapon and the right strength, he would have been homocidal. Each time he abused someone, he earned a time out; throughout which he screamed bloody murder.
We will never forget the looks on the face of another child, a six-year-old girl we shall call Ginny, each time we took her to a visit, waited the required fifteen minutes, and then were told by the visitation supervisor that there would be no visit because Ginny's mother did not show up or call. The mother, still mired in her substance abuse addictions, loved Ginny, but not nearly so much as she loved her own narcissistic image in the mirror. Ginny's father loved her, too, but the mother had bad-mouthed him to the naive caseworker, so instead of immediately pursuing the father as an option for Ginny, the initial months of casework focus were to reunify Ginny with a mother still in the throes of alcoholism. Meanwhile Ginny got her hopes up time and again, and time and again the mother thought only of herself and her booze.
They don't teach caseworkers about these crushing realities faced by abused and neglected children. The graduate schools of social work are dominated by left-wing faculty members who hold views idealizing the "poor," and making endless excuses for irresponsible behavior. Feminism is also rampant on these faculties, so it rarely seems to occur to these social workers who graduate from these schools that a father may be an appropriate choice to parent his child. Ginny eventually was placed with her father, who had been calling us long distance from the East coast regularly to talk to his daughter. We hammered the point home to the caseworker, who finally woke up.
If the system does not intervene and truly protect a child in the crucial first twelve to eighteen months of the child's life, the child is likely to have had many reinforcing experiences teaching her that her adult caretakers cannot be trusted. The more of those experiences that pile up in her life, the more difficult it will be for the child to learn to trust an adult who really is there to care for the child. She may decide she must fend for herself, thereby becoming perhaps increasingly manipulative and narcissistic, putting herself above all others at all times. This can lead to her seeing other people as objects to be manipulated, rather than as fellow humans with whom she can interact, learn from, and appreciate.
